Application Of Basic-level Explicature From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory In The Teaching Of Senior High School’s English Reading Comprehension

Reading is a complex cognitive psychological activity which happened between writerand reader. Reading comprehension is also essential in teaching and learning. According toNew Curriculum Standard of Senior English (trial edition) in2003in China,“Language is animportant tool for human communication. The courses should be adapted to students’cognitive traits and academic requirements. It lays emphasis on improving students’ abilitiesto obtain and process information, analyze and solve problems.” Thus, from the perspective ofbasic-level explicature of relevance theory, the author tries to probe reading process bycombining examples to analyze reading strategies, aiming to shed light on teaching activities.The author first reviews reading theories about its nature, process and common ones arealso reviewed including bottom-up, top-down, interactive and schema-theoretical models.However，there is a core idea that reading is a mode of human communication. In the1980s,Sperber and Wilson proposed relevance theory suggesting that communication isostensive-inferential which is directed by explicature conducting old and new information.Based on this, the author uses this theory to probe reading strategies to help studentsunderstand texts correctly and improve their reading ability. Specifically, at semantic levelusing disambiguation to choose specific words’ meaning and reference assignment to identifymeaning; at syntactic level using free enrichment to enrich meaning; at contextual level usingad hoc construction to narrow and broaden certain concept and so forth.The author puts forward basic-level explicature of relevance theory used in teachingreading and elaborates on its function, principle and strategies. To examine the effectivenessof this model, two classes are randomly selected from a senior high school. One isexperimental class using new model and the other is control class using the traditional modelby tests and questionnaire in AnShan KuangShan Senior High School, LiaoNing Province.After four months’ experiment, the author collected data and analyzed them statistically byusing SPSS19.0to conduct a comparative study. It is concluded that the reading ability ofexperimental class achieves higher efficiency after the teaching treatment.Finally, major findings of the thesis are summarized and some limitations are also putforward along with some suggestions for teaching reading activities in senior high school.